Untangling Two Myths: Tragic Mulatto is a Myth and Race is Not Culture

Published by rachels | Filed under Uncategorized

In one of my posts over at Rachel’s Tavern a commenter, Stu, gave a comment that I wanted to respond to. The comment is prefaced on two myths that I frequently see regarding race. You can read the whole discussion over at Rachel’s Tavern. Lyonside gave a very long and eloquent response, which you can read the here.

Let me start with the following quote from Stu:

Why is no one worried about the mixed cultural identity/confusion of the child in one of these relationships? I hear talk that cultures can co-exist but the fact is they don’t really. They compete with one another until one eventually wins out. If that doesn’t happen, the child will no doubt struggle with identity issues throughout his/her life and never truly belong to either. That’s sadly the way it is with culture. Say a black person and a white person marry one another and have a kid. Well, chances are that kid will always be looked upon by both families as “different” and perhaps even “not really one of them” because of his genetics. The families might not even outwardly know they are thinking this way, it’s just an innate human behavior to put importance in blood-lines and pedigree.

There are no studies that I am aware of that indicate that mental health problems are greater in multiracial people than any of the rest of the population. The notion that a multiracial person is somehow confused or troubled extends well into American history, and it is called the tragic mulatto myth. This myth assumes that biracial or multiracial people are confused, lost souls who are accepted by no one. From what I have seen, this is often a form of projection. Projection occurs when people see their own insecurities or discomfort in others, so in the case of multiracial people, many people who come from monoracial backgrounds are uncomfortable with interracial relationships and multiracial people, so they assume that because they are uncomfortable that the mixed race person must also be uncomfortable. Moreover, mixed race people have long been part of American culture, and in the case of Black/White mixed race people, they were traditionally considered Black. In spite of the mixed race background, this group was considered Black and was accepted in the Black community. This is an important point because mixed race people have traditionally been accepted in the African American community. The African American community is a mixed race and mixed cultural group (and the vast majority of African Americans have European and/or American Indian backgrounds). So traditionally, it was the Euro-American whites who rejected mixed race people. This challenges the tragic mulatto image because it undermines the idea that there is no community that has accepted mixed race people. This is not to say that there were not individual whites who accepted mixed race people and individuals blacks who rejected mixed race people.

The second point is more a general point about sociology–race and culture are not the same. They are two different concepts. Culture is a synonym for a “society.” Cultures generally have similar norms, values, beliefs, language, and material items. Of course, most modern societies have some cultural mixing, but there is generally a dominant culture and some subcultures. Race refers to people who are grouped together based on subjectively, selected phenotypical (physical) characteristics. Race is generally about the appearance of people whereas culture is more about their beliefs and practices. If I marry a Polish guy, we would have a cross cultural marriage, and assuming he is white we would have a same race marriage. If I marry an African American man, we would have an interracial marriage, but I wouldn’t consider it to be cross cultural. What is fascinating about the United States is that even though people frame their discussions of interracial marriage in terms of “culture,” what really bothers them is race. Think about the example above. I suspect that most people would have more trouble with me marrying the Black man who comes from the same culture than they would the Polish man who comes from a different culture. I do think there are some subcultural differences between African Americans and European Americans here in the US, but they are probably less than those between myself and people in many European countries. Thus, I think the notion that racial differences=cultural differences needs to be framed in a different way. To the extent that there are subcultural differences between racial groups here in the US, this is largely the result of segregation, and in many cases cultural differences within racial categories are greater than those across racial categories. Can there be conflicts when people cross cultural lines, sure, but we should not limit our critique of this to when people cross racial lines.

Last, point. In my own research most relatives of interracial couples actually became more accepting when their relatives had children. I think the idea that families see biracial children as genetically different defies logic. No matter how a child is defined racially they still have half of their genes from each biological parent, which is no different than couples where people are from the same race. There is no unique genetic pattern that occurs when people have mixed race children, genetics works the same not matter the race(s) of the parents.

I don’t have much to add about biological notions of race. I think Lyonside did an excellent job challenging the idea of biological races. However, I do want to challenge this statement:

There is, because of all this, much tention in the IR nuclear family and it comes at a critically impressionable time in the child’s life. This problem of inner struggle for acceptance of family and culture is only solved a few ways in the big picture…

1. One world/large regional race (such that race wouldn’t be an issue)
2. A replacing of traditional cultures ( because trad. cultures don’t really fit together in the long run)
3. TRUE acceptance by all members of the family (highly unlikely)

I have not seen any studies that directly look at the amount of conflict in interracial families, so I think this is an empirical question that is not validated by any data that I am aware of. I have seen a study that indicates that IRs are more likely to end in divorce, but I think rather than putting this on the couple. We need to think about the social stigma that many people put on interracial relationships–not so much the couple themselves, but the social reaction to the couple. That is where the real problem is. Rather than viewing mixed race people or interracial couples as the problem we need to think of racism and racist reactions to (and from) the couple as the real problem.

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